Industrial electronics giant Siemens announced it intends to build out a cloud-based platform for a range of data services to be used for everything from predictive condition monitoring to energy management optimisation.

The platform, which is based on SAP’s in-memory compute platform HANA, will be hosted in the cloud and is currently being piloted by a range of Siemens customers.

“The establishment of the new cloud platform will make a significant contribution to driving forward the digitalization of automation. Powerful services for analyzing data from industry are an important part of our digital enterprise strategy,” said Klaus Helmrich, managing board member of Siemens AG.

The company, which produces a wide range of industrial electrical equipment including wind turbines, smart grid and building technologies, said it plans to make the cloud service available to other original equipment manufacturers so it can be used to develop applications that integrate with the Siemens’ back-end data services.

Siemens launched a series of data services aimed at improving automation and resource management in manufacturing and energy plants last year.

Using data services to improve industrial automation and optimise resource management has become the focus of other industrial automation specialists like GE as well as more traditional enterprise IT incumbents like IBM over the past few years.

In 2013 GE, a more direct competitor to Siemens, launched a series of ‘industrial internet’ solutions that tightly integrate with its manufacturing and assembly line equipment as well as its airline engines (although it recently broadened the platform so that other OEMs can leverage the data generated by their equipment for similar ends).